On January 31st, 1921, a Coast Guard surfman sighted a vessel trapped on North Carolina’s infamous Diamond Shoals. Owing to bad weather, a Coast Guard boat was not able to reach the stranded vessel until February 4. When they boarded the ship, the crew was missing. How the “Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals” came to be stranded, and what happened to her crew, is an enduring mystery.
In August of 1918, as the armies of Europe neared exhaustion, American troops of the 28th “Keystone” division were thrown into a nearly forgotten battle that fully represented the horrors of the War to End All Wars.
Of the vaunted ironclad warships of the US Civil War perhaps the mightiest and most terrifying was the confederate ram Tennessee. On August 5, 1864, she would be put to the test in the largest naval engagement of the war, an engagement that defined the divided loyalties of the War of the Rebellion.